The rise and fall of foot-binding in China

Foot-binding was the customary practice in some parts of China that involved tightly binding young girls' feet in order to modify their size and shape. Bound feet involved a trade-off for the family - the girl would increase her chances of marrying well, but at a cost of a lifetime of pain and discomfort, as well as a reduction in the girl's contribution to agricultural labour.

The practice of foot-binding arose in the 10th Century C.E., and continued until it was finally banned in the early 20th Century. Why did such a practice arise, and why did it persist for so long? As with most things, it has to do with incentives.

In a recent job market paper, Xinyu Fan (UCLA) and Lingwei Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) looked at the changing incentives for foot-binding. They identified a key change in the 10th Century that created the incentives for foot-binding - the introduction of the keju (the civil service examination system). As they explain:

The system was established during the Sui (581-618) and the Tang (618-907) dynasties, consolidated and expanded during the Song (960-1276) and fully institutionalized during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911). During the post-Song period, the most important central and local officials and bureaucrats were selected through this system...

The exam system generated a social hierarchy and deeply affected social mobility in historical China, serving as a major social ladder for men to climb up.

Prior to the introduction of the keju, marriage was almost entirely within-class. Upper class women would marry upper class men (who would often be civil officials, like their fathers), and lower class women would marry lower class men. The keju system shook up this arrangement, because now the appointment of officials was meritocratic - within the upper-class men, those that performed better on the exams would rise up the civil service ranks faster. This increased the competition for the 'best' men, and one way to attract those men was for young women to increase their attractiveness through foot-binding. As Fan and Wu note:

In a stratified society where marriage is completely assortative in terms of family status and there is no incentive for foot-binding. The introduction of a gender-biased examination system significantly increased men’s mobility and quality dispersion. Historically, this led to the emergence of foot-binding among upper class women. When meritocracy increases further, as happened historically in China, marrying-up benefits continue to increase, and foot-binding diffuses from upper class women to lower class women, exactly the sequence observed in China.

Fan and Wu provide a variety of evidence supporting their theory, including the opportunity cost of foot-binding. In areas of rice cultivation, where more agricultural labour is required, the opportunity cost of foot-binding (and losing the girl's agricultural labour) is higher than in areas of wheat cultivation, where less agricultural labour is required. As predicted by the theory:

...our empirical analysis using county-level from the Republican archives shows that higher suitability of rice relative to wheat and higher suitability for household handicraft are associated with less/more foot-binding among lower class women respectively, and the county exam quota predicts a higher incidence of foot-binding.

Opportunity cost also explains the decline of foot-binding increased:

...after lasting for more than a thousand years, the gender-biased exam system collapsed in 1905. After the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, Christian missionaries spread God’s message in China. An important part of the missionary work was the establishment of girl’s schools, mostly in coastal cities. During the Republican years, girls had greater opportunity to attend school. The increasing equality of educational opportunities promoted women’s upward mobility, and women’s quality dispersion began to catch up with that of men. In this case, the payoff of foot-binding as a costly beauty investment decreased...

Another economic force driving Chinese women out of foot-binding was the modern industrialization process. Starting in the late Qing, industrialization imposed transport infrastructure, and more integrated markets, which deeply altered the market structure for textile production... the opportunity cost of foot-binding increased, because women now had to leave their homes to work in distant factories...

Fan and Wu don't provide empirical evidence in support of this, but perhaps that is an opportunity for some future research.

In economics, we are particularly interested in the role of incentives. Foot-binding arose because of a change in incentives for young girls (and their families), and eventually died out as a cultural practice when the incentives changed again (albeit, nearly a thousand years later).

[HT: Marginal Revolution, early last year]